New CBB

Some of you might remember me posting a ridiculously minimalistic phonology in the random phonology thread, and Visinoid telling me to do a full conlang based on it.

So, i made one.

Grammar
•Version 0
•Version 0.1
•Version 1
•Version 2

Dictionary
•To Do

Script
•Example
•Font

_________________
| | | (Nahuatl) | (Sanskrit & Pali) (Yaghan) | (Antregabua)
CrazyEttin's Lair

Record yourself saying that last phrase.

I appreciate how you considered my wish to make it into a conlang. -_^ I'm pretty sure you're not crazy, unless your speaking about your nickname. :D And the grammar makes sense so far.

I know <u> represents that boring back rounded vowel, but think that it formats and reads much more easily than <x>. It's just a suggestion. -_^

Nice name. Reminds me of QangTaq.

_________________
My Kankonian-English dictionary: 36,000 entries and counting

31,416: The number of the conlanging beast!

I think i'm actually able to pronounce it (I like to be able to pronounce my conlangs). Now i'll just have to find my microphone...



Your wish was a perfect excuse to create a lang with such a silly phonology.



I have no idea if i'm actually crazy.



Good.



Using ‹x› makes the orthography look more weird. And weird is good.

_________________
| | | (Nahuatl) | (Sanskrit & Pali) (Yaghan) | (Antregabua)
CrazyEttin's Lair

But would a French missionary ever come up with that?

_________________
そうだ。死んでいる人も勃起することが出来る。
俺はその証だ。

The missionary in question thought the same way i think this: ‹u› is too associated with the rounded back vowel, using it is like using ‹e› for [ø].

_________________
| | | (Nahuatl) | (Sanskrit & Pali) (Yaghan) | (Antregabua)
CrazyEttin's Lair

Weird is not necessarily good.

The most "typical" use of <u> may be to represent the round, back vowel. But that's not it's only use. It may be a front vowel, or an unrounded one.

If it's unnatural to use <u> for [ɯ], then <x> would be even more unnatural.

Otherwise, it's a quite nice, semi-experimental language.

_________________
constructedlanguages.net

I prefer <x> over <u>, it fills the purpose of representing the sound as a very variable one (given the different allophones) and of course emphasizes the unroundedness. Keep it! =)

There have been much weirder orthographies.



Thanks.

_________________
| | | (Nahuatl) | (Sanskrit & Pali) (Yaghan) | (Antregabua)
CrazyEttin's Lair

I like it!

You probably should consider describing the phonology of the tone system in more detail though. There's scope to do all sorts of interesting phonological things with tones!

_________________
Languages!
Native: Proficient: Decent: Have dabbled in:

For example?
This is my first time doing a conlang with tones, so i don't know much about them.

_________________
| | | (Nahuatl) | (Sanskrit & Pali) (Yaghan) | (Antregabua)
CrazyEttin's Lair

Well, a lot of tone languages have lots and lots of tone sandhi, so you could do something with that. A lot of tonal languages have weird phonations. It seems to be very common for a low or falling tone to be realized as creaky voice.

_________________
"Wait for the starvation of glaciers, chicken hamburger Noel Weber Arthur."

= | = | =

Also, from what I've learnt about tones in phonology, there's a rule that the underlying representation of the word can't have two of the same tone adjacent, although tones can be attached to multiple syllables in a row. (So, for example, something like [táká] would have one high tone attached to both syllables.) [That's called the Obligatory Contour Principle if you want to look it up.] This means interesting things can happen when you add an affix of the same tone as its base (for example, in Shona, a stem with a high tone changes it to a low tone if you add a prefix with a high tone).

Tones apparently also have a habit of moving around: in Somali, for example, you can't have a high tone at the end of a phrase, so it gets moved to the penultimate syllable if a syllable with a high tone ends up in phrase final position.

One thing to think about as well is that the phonological theory of tones I'm familiar with analyses them as on a separate 'tier' of the representation of the word, so that the string of tones is separate from the other segments of the word underlyingly, and is then linked to appropriate tone bearing units in the surface form.

_________________
Languages!
Native: Proficient: Decent: Have dabbled in:

Version 0.1!

Added the obligatory contour principle to the phonology, but kept the tone system otherwise very simple. Not really any other changes.

_________________
| | | (Nahuatl) | (Sanskrit & Pali) (Yaghan) | (Antregabua)
CrazyEttin's Lair

Cool! Glad to have been able to offer some useful feedback

_________________
Languages!
Native: Proficient: Decent: Have dabbled in:

Two mid tones can occur consecutively in a single word, right?
...
If you suffix a high-tone suffix onto a high-tone-ending base, why do you change the suffix's tone to low instead of to mid?
If you suffix a low-tone suffix onto a low-tone-ending base, why do you change the suffix's tone to high instead of to mid?
If you prefix a high-tone prefix onto a high-tone-beginning base, why do you change the prefix's tone to low instead of to mid?
etc.
...
Why did you choose to change the suffix's tone rather than move the base's ending tone earlier into the base? Similarly, why did you choose to change the prefix's tone rather than move the base's initial tone later into the base?
...
I am not saying the choices you made are unnaturalistic nor unrealistic; far from it! I'm only asking why you made the decisions you did make. Your reasons may have been purely aesthetic.

_________________
I am not responsible for the accuracy of my sources; they're responsible for their own mistakes, if any, and also responsible for defending their own statements if you disagree with them.

unaesthetic

_________________
Up in blue sky silly blimp goes by
Where it come from where it go
Ziggy-Zaggy it fly high

Because if there are two endings, eg. -ang and -áng, they would be identical if -áng changed to -ang instead of -àng when following a high tone.



Because the tone is phonemic, so moving it around would create serious confusion. The changing of tone from low to high or high to low in endings and prefixes doesn't create confusion, since only two tones contrast in those (Eg. you can have -ang and either -áng or àng, but never all of the three).



Actually my reasons were mostly to keep the system simple, since i've never created a tonal conlang before. In the next version of the lang, which i'm currently working on, i'm simplifying it even more into a pitch accent system.

_________________
| | | (Nahuatl) | (Sanskrit & Pali) (Yaghan) | (Antregabua)
CrazyEttin's Lair

That's a nice lang, phonology is silly but it's meant to be.
Expressing grammatical meanings by tones is a nice idea I have been planning to employ, too.
Have yoy got acquainted with Nilo-Saharan languages. I've heared they are crazy.

- How is your vowel allophony? Are /r/ and /v/ allophones of the closed vowel?
Does /a/ have any allophony?

- You said you are scrapping the tone system, but I still ask about your 0.1 version: how is the stress realised? Normally it is the tone that makes a syllable stressed. Your stress system is by the way very Finnish-y (my all langs have that).

-The plural marker was a line above something. What does it represent?